Archives for April 2015

As the inaugural .NEXT conference slowly creeps up and the speed and change in the industry is only continuing to accelerate. While CIOs, Operations managers, development teams and sysadmins struggle to keep pace an important ally has become the ability for the customers to demand choice and simplicity. Simplicity reduces pain and choice gives the feeling of safety.

While Steve Herrod was CTO at VMware he had coined the term Software Defined Datacenter. The ability for a workload to live anywhere has been dream for many years but now is a reality as other services like backup and disaster recovery have continued to evolve. It’s always been easy to spin up virtual machines but another to protect and manage them all.

Technologies from Nutanix and Gold sponsor of .NEXT, Rubrik highlights how customers are adapting to backup and disaster recovery needs. Simplicity comes in the form of the mentality of it “just works” across private or public backup solutions.

Rubrik being a virtualization only backup solution has many similarities to Nutanix. Both Nutanix and Rubrik provide simplicity with:
· Rapid deployment
· Fractional consumption based models
· Built web-scale technologies that are designed to scale on demand
· As you scale configuration complexity doesn’t increase
· Per VM backup to local and remote appliances and AWS
· Ability to create multiple backup schedules, SLAs & retention periods
· HTML 5 user interface to avoid plugins, reduce setup times and highly available control plane

When things “Just Work” you don’t have to be an expert in the technology and you can focus your time on how your business makes money. Backup and DR are a time sinks until unfortunately time comes when you need to use them. As public cloud back up uses cases it great for companies that don’t have to spend the money on keeping the lights on for backup\DR.

Some other similarities between the two companies are make up of the companies. There is a heavy DNA of google blood line in engineering, they share a common venture capital firm in Lightspeed Ventures. Both the CEO of Rubrik, Bipul Sinha and one of the founders of Rubrik Mark Leslie, sit on the board of Nutanix. If you’re thinking you like a full stack play, Nutanix can be your primary data fabric and Rubrik for your secondary fabric. Remember, friends not let friends do complex!

Check out the chassis, Top and bottom, notice anything similar?!

Choice is important because there is never 1 way to do things for 100% for everybody. When it comes to getting work done most of us have experience of being locked into the UI of vendor X. If it’s not in the UI you can’t change the workflow to meet your needs and then you start doing things that really consume a lot of time. Manually adding VM’s to backups it just one of those boring redundant tasks. In a large cloud environment you wouldn’t want to just backup every new virtual machine every 1 hr on the 1 hr but might want to do this say after X days once it been deemed important. This could be both accomplished by Nutanix or Rubrik via Rest API’s with ability to tie in your own business logic into the workflow.

Rest API’s represent the ultimate choice in how to run your infrastructure. When Marc Andreessen’s authored “Software is Eating The World” was about the industries being distributed by software. Both Nutanix and Rubrik share this view and have more news on how they’re both disrupting the datacenter at .NEXT.

I was trying to find some examples of companies that weren’t just web companies using DevOps to change their business. I stumbled across the below video of Heather (@hmmickman) and Ross (@rossclanton) that talk about their teams and company’s story about getting aboard the DevOps train. The thing that I heard above people and process was API’s. Even with the use of a few API’s, automation can be used to change the game in your environment.

Target’s use of API’s

In the context of test and dev environments(production too) it’s automation that drives cost down. Hypervisors like Nutanix’s Linux KVM version offers something unique in that department being hyper-converged. Imagine having something that has predictable performance, the ability to quickly deploy your applications with VAAI, run docker containers, deploy and move nodes around the environment, attach storage automatically, use Packer to build consistent environments for KVM, ESXi and your local desktop. They’re so many choices to get the job done today, it’s really exciting to see all the options today. Puppet Chef, Salt and so on. I would encourage people to register for .Next and see what the future has in store with you and Nutanix.

While this video is about DevOps, I think it can be applied to most if not all businesses if you want to be successful. Adam Jacob mentions in the below video, “Do not be timid about the scope or the influence – we are re-inventing the way we run businesses”. Nutanix does have lofty goals but that’s apart of the lure of Nutanix. Would you want to be apart of something that is mediocre? Web-scale gets poked at but that’s cool, it’s all about the end state plus life is too short to take everything seriously.

Some of the other points really resonate with me when interacting with sales, engineering and product management at Nutanix:

Design for the safety, contentment, knowledge and freedom of both your peers and your customers.

Each choice you make needs to make life better for the humans involved

The ability for individuals to act without fear of unintended consequences

Access to knowledge is a leading indicator of social progress.

Pull over Push – The “Pull” of demand aligns process and resources, rather than the “Push” of central planning and prediction

Empowerment

Small batches, near term hypothesis – validation comes from customers

DevOps doesn’t have to be technical, It’s about you figuring out what works in your environment. Are you DevOps Kungfu?